I am VP & GM of the Documents Cloud for Citrix, which acquired my company ShareFile in 2011. ShareFile is a file-transfer service built for business users who need secure, reliable and easy tools for sharing data. I launched ShareFile in 2005 and bootstrapped the company from zero to four million users in six years; today Citrix ShareFile has millions of users in more than 100 countries.
I also have launched and/or led several other cloud and e-commerce businesses, including Rapidata.net, a pharmaceutical market research company, and the website development firm novelProjects. Though I’ve been part of Citrix for several years now, I still feel like (and approach my work like) an entrepreneur. As a founding partner of HQ Raleigh and ThinkHouse, I’m particularly interested in helping the Research Triangle area become a top-five region for entrepreneurship and innovation in the U.S. I hold a degree in philosophy from Duke University and serve on the board of directors of Yext.

When Ignoring Your Customers Is The Right Move

This era of unprecedented access to customers has created a conundrum: When should you listen to your customers? And when should you ignore them?

My favorite band, Weezer, has a roller-coaster history when it comes to customer feedback. Their first self-titled album was a hit. Their second album, Pinkerton, debuted to lackluster reviews and was labeled one of the worst albums of 1996 in a Rolling Stone magazine reader poll. But over time, the album caught on. Sales steadily increased, and it eventually became a cult favorite. In 2000, Rolling Stone rated Pinkerton among the top 100 albums of the 1990s.

A decade later, Weezer gave fans a novel role in the production of their fourth album, Maladroit: the band posted demos of new songs on their website, and invited fans to vote for the songs they thought should end up on an album. But the band didn’t like what they heard — they reportedly said the feedback was incoherent and not constructive — and in the end only one of the fans’ picks ended up on the album. But the album quickly went gold, and Spin and Rolling Stone both included the album on top 10 lists for 2002.

It’s an example of how totally unreliable our consumers can be when it comes to giving useful, constructive feedback. If always listening to customer feedback was foolproof, running a successful business (or putting out a platinum album) would be a piece of cake. But of course it’s not. Sifting through the flood of feedback to find what’s useful is more of an art than a science, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

People are biased toward the past. Sometimes your customers are more likely to resist improvements to your product simply because they like what they know. Every time Facebook rolls out a major change to its news feed, there is so much user outrage that you’d think Mark Zuckerberg personally gave the middle finger to each of the site’s billion users. After a few months, people get used to the changes and everyone is happy.

Longtime users might take longer to recognize the value of new features or improvements, so take their feedback with a grain of salt until they’ve had a couple of months to get used to the changes. Of course, if brand-new users also hate your product changes, it may be time to re-evaluate.

To get more representative feedback, survey a large enough number of customers (here’s a nifty tool for figuring out statistical significance), and try to poll a random sample of customers. Offering the survey as a pop-up on your website or within your application, for instance, rather than through a link in a newsletter or in social media, can help you reach a broader pool of customers.

You can also hear that silent majority just by watching actual product usage; a good analytics program will help you understand the impact of changes to your product.

Listen to your customer’s pain points, not necessarily his ideas. British novelist Neil Gaiman gives this advice for writing, and it applies to entrepreneurs, too: “When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

Take your customers’ problems seriously without getting bogged down by their wish lists. Maybe they’re asking for features or services that just aren’t part of what you do. Be confident in your vision and your goals, and evaluate whether customer requests support that vision or fall outside its scope.

Test, test, test — on a small scale. Now that you’ve gathered feedback and identified customers’ pain points, you’ll undoubtedly devise brilliant solutions. But be sure to test your brilliant solution before you roll it out widely. Run a test with a small segment of your user base and gather more feedback to fine-tune the solution. Experimenting on a small scale lets you take risks and refine without disrupting the whole enterprise. Your test might confirm your brilliance, or it might expose weaknesses that you can address before rollout. Either way, you win.

Customer feedback is critical to developing your product and business. When you give your customers meaningful opportunities to provide feedback, you gain insight into their needs and perceptions, develop better solutions to their problems, and create a give-and-take relationship that can help build trust and loyalty.

Just keep in mind that some opinions matter more than others. And it’s OK to take a lesson from the wise old guys of Weezer and stick to your gut: Sometimes your customers just need some time to see the full value of what you’re offering.

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